Meet Mark

Let me introduce myself. My name is Mark Sisson. I’m 63 years young. I live and work in Malibu, California. In a past life I was a professional marathoner and triathlete. Now my life goal is to help 100 million people get healthy. I started this blog in 2006 to empower people to take full responsibility for their own health and enjoyment of life by investigating, discussing, and critically rethinking everything we’ve assumed to be true about health and wellness...

Category: Fitness

By Mark Sisson | July 18 2018

One of the biggest mistakes I see among people who exercise is they forget this core truth: we get fitter not from training, but from recovering from training. This doesn’t just occur in beginners either. Some of the most experienced, hardest-charging athletes I know fail to heed the importance of recovery. Hell, the reason my endurance training destroyed my life and inadvertently set the stage for creation of the Primal Blueprint was that I didn’t grasp the concept of recovery. I just piled on the miles, thinking the more the merrier.

By Mark Sisson | July 17 2018

Both CrossFit and bodybuilding involve lifting weights and putting them back down, repeatedly, several times each week. Both are forms of exercise. The similarities stop there. The real meat lies in the differences.

What’s different about CrossFit and bodybuilding? What can we learn from those differences? What can they learn from each other?

By Mark Sisson | July 02 2018

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering several questions from readers about my own personal routines and interests as well as a Primal take on beginning fitness. First, what’s my sleep hygiene routine? Do I even have one, and how has it changed over the years? Second, how do I make sure I’m staying on track in life? What’s the “one marker to rule them all”? Third, are there any good supplements or interventions for DOMS—delayed onset muscle soreness—due to training? Fourth, what are two places I’d love to live, and live Primally? Fifth, how should a totally inexperienced person who’s just lost a bunch of weight through eating alone get started with exercise? And sixth, how do I handle myself in eating situations where I have no direct control over the quality of ingredients (oils, etc) used?

By Guest | June 25 2018

A couple weeks ago I asked for ideas for our Primal Health Coaches—what questions have you ever wanted to ask a Primal Health Coach? Many of you wrote in, and I loved reading your ideas. There were so many excellent thoughts I couldn’t begin to include them all here. (Luckily, our coaches might join us for a future post.)

So, sit back and take a look at what our Primal Health Coaches have to say about meal plans, cardio classes, behavior change, physician recommendations, their Primal Health Coach Institute experience, and more!

By Mark Sisson | June 21 2018

This morning I shared how I’ve changed my approach to stress over the last couple of decades. For me, this meant first addressing the toll of my training. It’s how the Primal Blueprint, in fact, was born. In today’s feature and in this video (with my long-time friend and co-author, Brad Kearns), I talked about how adaptogenic herbs made a difference for my recovery. I formulated my own supplement to literally help myself first. Fellow athlete friends wanted to try it, and that’s how Primal Calm (now called Adaptogenic Calm) came into being. The fact is, like everything I’ve chosen to sell, my interest in the product sprung from my own story.

By Mark Sisson | June 20 2018

Workouts are work. There’s no way around that. Whenever you move matter through space and time, whether you’re displacing your own body weight or a barbell or a kettle bell, you’re doing work. It’s just physics. But there’s another meaning of “work”: an unpleasant but necessary activity that helps you achieve a desired outcome. Far too many of our workouts end up embodying this second definition. They’re chores, strains. That’s why so many people—all of whom know they should be exercising on a regular basis—remain sedentary, unfit, weak individuals. Physical activity is no longer required to survive. We don’t “have” to do it anymore. If it feels like a miserable experience, why would we?